Tag: joy

Bread might be the staff of life, but how many of us know how to make it for ourselves?

Turning 30 three years ago gave Magpie a new passion for bread, never felt before. She put it down to hormones; despite growing up in a household of breadmakers, she had never known the passion until then. Surrounded as we are by all manner of breads, from the steam baked, chemical filled crap, to the wonderful artisan breads by local bakers such as Patrick Moore http://www.moreartisan.co.uk/, it doesn’t seem possible that we could create such indulgence for ourselves. But anyone who has ever tried to sell a difficult house should be able to pay testament to the selling properties of freshly baked bread.

It is excellently simple. Skill, of course, must be involved, but the techniques are so straightforward that a beginner can still get good results from the start.

Using a litre sized bowl or measuring jug, add 1 dessertspoon (15g) sugar and fill it with enough warm water to dissolve the granules. Cool it to blood temperature. The way to tell this is to dip your finger in. When you can’t feel the water – neither warmer or cooler than your finger – you have the temperature just right. You want about 600-800mls water. Different flours absorb it in differing ratios, so you just have to test it out as you go.

Using fresh yeast (Magpie HATES dried yeast, but it does work, so if that’s what you have, follow their instructions. Fresh yeast in the UK can be bought from Morrisons for about 50p and if in Tesco, you can ask the folks in the bakery and they might give you some for nothing) take a piece about 1cm squared – a little more is fine; you want it to rise – and crumble it into the cooled sugar water. Stir with a spoon until dissolved.

Wrap the top of the receptacle in cling film and place in a warmish location for 30 mins. You should find it bubbling infinitesimally gently which will tell you the yeast is live. If you can’t see anything, lay your ear over the mouth of the jug. If you can’t hear fizzing, your yeast is dead. If you can…

…stir it up and pour some into the bowl of flour with an accompanying glug of oil. Sunflower, olive, whatever takes your fancy. Traditionalists might prefer butter, but this is altogether easier. Stir with a table knife. You want the dough to be claggy without being sticky. Add more if it is dry, but not too much at a time. Not an easy judgement to make but one that comes better with practice. In the early stages, less has to be more. (More creates a loose dough that is hard to knead and impossible to control).

When you have a dough that can be handled, dump it onto a floured surface and knead for at least 8 minutes to get the glutens rolling. KNEAD, don’t TEAR. Tearing is bad. You are looking to stretch the dough.

When your dough is the same consistency of a voluptuous woman’s breasts, then you can leave it to rise for the first time. Best way is to put it straight back into the bowl with a damp, clean tea towel covering the bowl. This keeps the dough moist and if the dog stands in it (a paw print has been found before now), it doesn’t really matter.

When the dough has doubled in size (in a warm place, this should take about an hour; in a cooler one, up to three), dump it out onto the surface again and knock all the air out of it with more kneading action.
Using a blunt table knife, cut the dough approximately in half, then half again and half again. You should get about 8 ‘buns’ out of 1lb flour. Roll them up into even-sized balls and place on a baking tray.

Cover with the cloth again, leave to rise to double one more time and then put the oven on to 200 deg C.

Place in the oven, mid-shelf, between 20-30mins.

How do you know it is baked? Turn your buns over and tap them on their flat bums. If the tap sounds hollow, you’ve got a baked bun.

Lashings of butter on warm buns, with or without cheese, nutella, peanut butter or jam makes these babies more worthy of adulation and worship than any chemical, long life creation from the supermarket.

NOTE: Oven baked bread also makes the best breadcrumbs (once stale), the best addition to homemade burgers and the world’s greatest stuffing. Plastic bread yields slime in all these uses, but home baked is the original and best.

NOTE 2: If you accidentally leave out the oil, it isn’t a disaster. The buns will be a little drier and they won’t keep as long.

Take one packet (or more) of variously sized fresh blueberries. Dump unceremoniously in a saucepan.

Add a few teaspoons of sugar to lift the high, flowery notes that will appeal to tastebuds located somewhere near your ears.

Pour a little water in the bottom, just enough to prevent the berries from sticking to the bottom of the pan before they release their juices.

Add heat. Add a lid to the pan.

Bring to the boil, then simmer gently for 5-10 minutes. Not too long – this superfood will be more Mr Muscle than Super if you cook all the vitamins out of it.

When the berries have cracked and let go of their purple essence and the sugar has dissolved to make a thin syrup, they are ready.

And why should we eat these tiny fruits? Apart from their cooked attractiveness, what else should enamour them to everyone?

Full of vitamin C, manganese, soluble fibre and with a dash of vitamin E, they couldn’t be wrong for us.

They also stop our brains from decaying: well, maybe that’s going a little far, but their anti-oxidant properties mean that if we ate enough of them, we could at least offset a little of the brain degeneration we cause through all the ghastly things we absorb. The ellagic acid which is also found in blueberries is known to prevent cancer and the kaempferol found in them (and also in those other superfoods, broccoli, spinach and tea) could even protect our women from ovarian cancer.

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A Bagful of Dragon – coming soon in 2018

Inayat isn’t a witch. She’s an ordinary twenty-something, screwing up her life one failed date at a time. But when she dumps the wrong magician, she finds herself in a bubbling cauldron of trouble and terror.

4 Steps to Social Media Marketing for Crafters – click to learn more

A toolbox to make selling crafts online easier.

Learn the ins and outs of social media marketing and supplement your income with your amazing craft projects.

“If you are someone who is looking to sell their crafts online but not sure where to get started, Sakina has you covered. I love how comprehensive, yet fluff-free this book is.” ~ Bushra Azhar, The Persuasion Revolution